What Peirce wrote about Cartesian doubt seems relevant here.

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to be dispelled by a maxim, for they are things which it does not occur to us can be questioned. Hence this initial skepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt; and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisfied until he has formally recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. It is, therefore, as useless a preliminary as going to the North Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by coming down regularly upon a meridian. A person may, it is true, in the course of his studies, find reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts. — CP 5.265, 1868

Even more fundamental than the cogito, is the fundamental law of logic: the law of non-contradictions. If a proposition is self-contradictory, then is it necessarily false, then its opposite is necessarily true. Let's apply it to the cogito: I think "I don't exist" is a self-contradiction because I cannot think "I don't exist" if I don't exist already. Therefore the opposite thought "I exist" is necessarily true.

Let's now apply it to the case of free will: the proposition "I don't have free will" is not a self-contradiction, because it is logically possible for a being to say this without having free will. EG: if a computer says it. Note that the opposite proposition is also not a self-contradiction. Therefore neither propositions are as certain as the cogito. There are arguments for and against free will, but they are not as strong as using an argument from non-contradiction, because they are based on premises, which need to be proven by other premises etc.

What exactly could be in doubt when you're having a personal experience?

In order to be fallible and something to doubt the experience would have to represent something. There is no point to treat the experience as fallible except under the assumption that it would be a representation, like a description, picture, or a model of what you experience. But I think this assumption is false; experiences are not representations.

An experience is what it is: the conscious awareness of some object or state of affairs under such and such conditions of experiencing it. Then it is neither right nor wrong, just how the object or state of affairs is experienced under such and such conditions, as a matter of fact. Nothing is then represented in a right or wrong way, but presented in your experience.

In other words, if we deny the veracity of things like free will, or the Self, or the mind in general, etc by appealing to things like scientific data, we immediately end up pulling the sheet out from under us. — darthbarracuda

But this is only a problem if perception and conception are conflated.

You have an idea that you have freewill. But that is a folk psychology concept - a theory you use to account for the observable phenomenology, like when you suddenly decide to clap your hands together in demonstration.

Then science might offer a different conceptual framework. And that may in fact address the phenomenologically observable rather better by stressing how much we don't have to consciously plan for useful motor actions. Most of the detailed timing and execution can be (in fact must be) left to learnt subconscious habit.

So what you really have are competing explanations for your experience.

There is the familiar cultural script where we are all meant to be "observant selves", personally responsible for our impulse control and our individual actions. The fact that we are largely always acting through established habits is not treated as much of an excuse. Society operates on the principle that we are in ceaseless charge of our thoughts and actions.

Then there is the more neuroscientifically realistic account where "consciousness" is attentional priming of a state of mind - a setting up of expectancies. Then subconscious mechanisms pull it all together in a fluid and integrated fashion. The role of attention in the moment of action is not to will anything in self-conscious fashion. That is just an extra load on the mind sure to fuck things up. At best, attention is there at the last split instant as "free won't" - ready to put the brakes on if a motor response is coming out wrong for some wider reason.

So neuroscience gets under the covers of the motor act and can explain the phenomenology in much greater detail. If you try to attend to the exact moment you decided to push some experimenter's button, neuroscience says the first time "you" concretely knew about it was when a reafference message was broadcast across the brain in a fashion that would allow your self-caused motion to be subtracted from the resulting lurch in your general perceptual state. If you turn your head to look at something, you want to know that was you turning and not the world. And even then, only so you could in fact ignore the very fact that you acted and so actually continue to experience "a stable world" as you bumble about doing stuff.

So the neuroscience view explains in fact why you have such a sense of a stable world in which you can then freely act. Conception and perception are the complementary possibilities that arise by this neural trick of distancing "a self" and "a world".

If you wave a videorecorder about (as kids untrained in camera work do), then the resulting images are like a mad crazy collage that makes no sense. Yet that is what our eyes do all the time. But "we" don't notice because all the motion is cancelled out at a preconscious level.

And in the same way, we have this social fiction of being individual observers acting out of freewill or conscious voluntary control. And the fiction works because the brain really does learn to divide our impressions of the world in a way where there is just an "us" that has an intention, and a world that then co-operates with any wishes in fairly predictable fashion. The less we have to think about, the more in control we feel.

But that then creates this clash of theories when it comes to folk psychology vs neuroscience. The folk psychology - as pursued by Descartes for example - wants to argue for some actual dualistic split between a perceiving soul stuff and a perceived world. Consciousness can't be this neuroscientific account of benignly pragmatic neglect - a refusal to sweat the detail. No. Consciousness must be in charge the whole time, all the way through, start to end ... otherwise there is no self, only automaton!

But as I say, freewill, the self, the mind, consciousness, experience, whatever ... these are all social constructs - conceptions used to organise our understanding of who "we" are. And society doesn't need us to have a deep theory about that. The aim from society's point of view is only to inculate the general habit of being attentive to what we do and self-regulate in a socially productive fashion.

However once we start to philosophise about mind, that is when a folk psychology level of conception can really screw us over. We are chasing a social fiction essentially.

This is another advantage of Peirce as a philosopher of mind. He had students like Jastrow as well colleagues like James. He was right in the thick of early psychology where the role of habits in the "machinery" of consciousness was a hot topic. So his semiotics incorporates that basic insight.

There is no reason to deny your experiences of imagining a potential action or actions, choosing a direction of action, and then observing results which in most cases will be different from what you initially imagined. I certainly wouldn't exchange these concrete images of existence for some other ideas which contradict concrete experiences. For what reason would one do such a thing especially lacking any substitute.

So what you really have are competing explanations for your experience. — apokrisis

The OP had less to do with free will per se although I appreciate your input anyway. The point I was trying to get across was that we can't "get around" that correlation between "the world" noumenon and "what we actually perceive" phenomenon.

I'm reminded of eliminative materialism, the doctrine that denies the existence of minds. How could I be so incredibly wrong about the existence of my own mind? I am my mind, aren't I not? It seems like a non-starter.

If you tell me that mind does not actually exist and it's just an illusion, I'm gonna wonder what else I'm hallucinating about. And so if you tell me that I am mistaken and that I have no free will, despite what I immediately perceive to be the case, what reason do I have to trust anything else? If you're telling me to discard something I have a clear experience of having, what reason do I have to accept what you're providing as an alternative? How can "further away" knowledge refute closer-at-hand knowledge without putting itself into doubt?

So when someone says "you have no free will", they are asking me to question something that I have a very close-to-home experience of having. There of course could be explanations and plausible theories as to why I experience what I experience, but the fact is that these theories rest on a "secondary level" of knowledge, for lack of a better term. What I experience immediately, up front and close, is the best information I have. A crude analogy would be an amateur telling an expert they're wrong about something - there's a possibility the amateur is actually right but the epistemic judgment clearly favors the expert. Am I not the expert of my own experiences? Do we not gain epistemic fallibility the further away we get from our most personal experiences?

Denying things like free will has the potential to put the whole project of science under doubt unless a plausible epistemology can be provided. I'm not saying it's inevitable or that it's impossible but I haven't the best idea as to how it can deal with this issue.

Am I not the expert of my own experiences? — darthbarracuda

(Y)

If you are saying that you are existence free will, without constraints, then I can only suggest that my experiences are much different from yours, and should you perform an experiment on yourself, e.g. have someone tie you up, you may be able to experience more concretely how your will is always under some constraints.

You can only imagine a possible action and try to act upon it. Actual outcome is entirely dictated by unfolding duration. The future is entirely unpredictable but there are choices that one can make as to how to direct will.

So how should we treat them when used in an argument for or against something that does involve representation.

But what if we doubt the accuracy of other personal experiences?

For example, it seems like most of the time I have conscious control over what I do. It seems like I have free will. — darthbarracuda

Like jkop I feel there's nothing to doubt about my personal experience. It happens...it happened.

As soon as it's in the past some doubt can reasonably set in. This might be the moment of waking: Ah, that was a dream. But then, it's just that a new experience clarifies the (memory of the) old.

And for me, any 'me', my own first person testimony will always trump scientific explanation, however much of a scientist I am. That's just the way a human is made. 'I don't care what your man Libet said, I know when I decided something.'

It's been a perplexing area for me, studying more 'metaphysics of mind': that a lot of the waffley sounds-like-science from Chalmers et al imagines that only third-person testimony, or a certain view of science, is going to 'explain' consciousness. There are perfectly good ways of thinking about first-person experiences in a scientific manner. They come from social science, however, and there's a certain strain of physical/biological science folk who just disregard social science.

Anyway: I think that as I've got older, I've become more and more aware of how 'I' inhabit a creature who often seems to be deciding things for me while my mind is busy with other things. There is a first person way of looking at the sorts of things apo cites. But experience loses its most personal meaning if we re-express it all in the third person for the sake of purported explanations.

The fact that we are largely always acting through established habits is not treated as much of an excuse. Society operates on the principle that we are in ceaseless charge of our thoughts and actions. — apokrisis

This is an interesting point, consistent with Peirce's observation that only our future conduct is subject to self-control - obviously not our past conduct, and really not even our present conduct. How should this inform our whole approach to ethics? Perhaps that question belongs in its own thread.

How could I be so incredibly wrong about the existence of my own mind? I am my mind, aren't I not? It seems like a non-starter. If you tell me that mind does not actually exist and it's just an illusion, I'm gonna wonder what else I'm hallucinating about. — darthbarracuda

Peirce seems to have shared these sentiments:

Tell me, upon sufficient authority, that all cerebration depends upon movements of neurites that strictly obey certain physical laws, and that thus all expressions of thought, both external and internal, receive a physical explanation, and I shall be ready to believe you. But if you go on to say that this explodes the theory that my neighbour and myself are governed by reason, and are thinking beings, I must frankly say that it will not give me a high opinion of your intelligence. — CP 6.465, 1908

By distinguishing one's personal experience as a fact from one's personal belief about its meaning or interpretation.

For example, I taste a sip of coffee, and the experience lets me know, directly, what it tastes like. Now I may form a belief about it, predict what the next sip might taste like, under other conditions etc.. My belief can be right, or wrong, because it represents a probable taste of the coffee. The experience, however, doesn't; it gives me direct access to what the coffee is like, its taste is not represented but presented in my conscious awareness. There is no ultimate coffee-taste "in-itself" which each sip would somehow represent more or less successfully (not to be confused with an intended taste that a barista, for instance, might want to achieve as s/he prepares the coffee).

The idea that experiences would be representational is utter nonsense, yet persistent in thought about perception where it is fueled by bad arguments, such as the argument from illusion.

I'm not following because eliminative materialism doesn't seek to say the mind doesn't exist. Rather the point is that folk psychology conceptions of it - conceptions we have to use to introspect - are quite clunky and culturally scripted.

So with freewill, society promotes the notion of a self that is in complete control, whereas science would say the "self" doesn't describe any particular functional unit, it is the name we give to the functional unity that can be observed over time. The self is an illusion in that sense.

Likewise having a conscience seems to be a big deal for some societies. But that is a very socially constructed thing as you can tell by cross culture comparisons.

So perhaps calling things illusions sounds too strong. We do construct actual habits and patterns of thought that answer to their folk psychology conceptions. If you push me on the existence of freewill, I will demonstrate it by lifting my hand without a problem when "I" decide.

But we also know from science that all phenomenology is a kind of illusion. Roses look red and smell sweet, yet the material reality is that there is some balance of reflected radiation and floating molecules whose bonding shape excites a particular interpretation in the nose.

So in a sense, eliminativism seems to want to talk about "real illusions". And the objection then is the degree this becomes a rather negative and paradoxical framing of the situation. It has a dismissive and scientistic ring - as if science can already explain things through its computational analogies in particular.

I of course say that computationalism - the mainstream paradigm - is itself just more folk psychology. The brain is not a machine like that. Which is why I instead take the neuro-semiotic view as the way to eliminate the general air of mystery. The idea of the mind as a modelling or sign relation is a more accurate theory in not seeking to reduce all reality just to material causes.

However as a general project, eliminativism makes sense. We have to strip away the socially constructed notions of what a mind should be to start to understand the mind from a more objectively and empirically founded point of view.

it seems like most of the time I have conscious control over what I do. It seems like I have free will. — darthbarracuda

It seems to me like I have some control over what I do, but it's by no means comprehensive or complete. I am also subject to appetites, wants, emotions, cravings, and so on, over which I have varying degrees of control. I certainly don't doubt that I exist, but recall the very disciplined argument that Descartes built from, in order to arrive at his notion of what constitutes a 'clear and distinct idea'.

It's worth recalling that Augustine anticipated Descartes 'cogito' by centuries:

"But who will doubt that he lives, remembers, understands, wills, thinks, knows, and judges? For even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts where his doubs come from, he remembers. If he doubts, he understands that he doubts. If he doubts, he wants to be certain. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows that he does not know. If he doubts, he judges that he ought not rashly to give assent. So whoever acquires a doubt from any source ought not to doubt any of these things whose non-existence would mean that he could not entertain doubt about anything."

Augustine, On the Trinity 10.10.14

And the objection [to eliminativism] then is the degree this becomes a rather negative and paradoxical framing of the situation. It has a dismissive and scientistic ring - as if science can already explain things through its computational analogies in particular. — apokrisis

Dennett's new book is basically a re-hashing of this idea. The analogy he gives is that consciousness is like the desktop operating system that allows us to function and navigate in the world, whereas the real work is being done by code and micro-processors that we have no idea of. However the reviews still say that he is trying to do away with, or explain away, the apodictic reality of first-person experience.

The basic objection I have is this: that even scientific judgements are still judgements. And judgements always have a qualitative aspect. We rely on saying that something 'is like' or 'is not like' something else - and that judgement is not a physical process. We even rely on such judgements to ascertain what 'a physical process' is. So whatever account is given of the neurological and evolutionary processes that apparently give rise to consciousness, also rely on judgements which are themselves imposed on those accounts. (I think that is the meaning of the 'transcendental nature of judgements'.)

So when eliminativism says that the 'socially-constructed notions' have to be 'stripped away', then why should the neurological and so-called scientific accounts of consciousness have any more weight that what has been stripped away? Don't you think that is the essence of 'scientism' - that it privileges the scientific account of the nature of mind, over the first-person appraisal or insight into the nature of mind?

Which is why I instead take the neuro-semiotic view as the way to eliminate the general air of mystery. — apokrisis

Why do you think that the elimination of mystery is a requirement? Humans are after all subject of experience, and you may never know what it is that makes another subject 'tick'. You can't write a specification for a person. I think the impulse or desire to scientifically explain the nature of the mind really is a form of scientism, whether you want to call it biosemiotic or whatever.

its taste is not represented but presented in my conscious awareness. — jkop

Exactly the metaphysics of presence.

Dennett's new book is basically a re-hashing of this idea. — Wayfarer

I discount Dennett as a serious voice. Frankly I find him all over the shop. Early on he was saying good things about intentionality and even the socially constructed nature of "self". But then he seemed to lose it with the popular success of Consciousness Explained. I couldn't extract a coherent position from that and haven't bothered reading his stuff since.

So whatever account is given of the neurological and evolutionary processes that apparently give rise to consciousness, also rely on judgements which are themselves imposed on those accounts. (I think that is the meaning of the 'transcendental nature of judgements'.) — Wayfarer

Yep. The semiotic view of life and mind says it is "judgments" all the way down. Nature is perfused in sign. Even the receptors studding a cell wall are making semantic interpretations in deciding what gets in.

Sure, there is something syntactical or mechanical about being a biological switch. But the switch is always acting with lived meaning. It matters to "someone" - the organism - what it does.

And that sure ain't the case with hardware and software ... unless there is a human just off to the side making sense of all its hurried electronic switching activity.

So when eliminativism says that the 'socially-constructed notions' have to be 'stripped away', then why should the neurological and so-called scientific accounts of consciousness have any more weight that what has been stripped away? Don't you think that is the essence of 'scientism' - that it privileges the scientific account of the nature of mind, over the first-person appraisal or insight into the nature of mind? — Wayfarer

But the whole notion of "first-person appraisal" is a linguist social construction. The first mistake about being a mind is to think we "just need to look to see what is really there".

As I say, even an animal might be phenomenal - there would be something it is like to be a bat - yet that is a still a biological construction. This is why pioneering semiologist Jacob Von Uexkull tried to imagine the 'Umwelt' of a bee - the world as it would appear as a pattern of signs serving a bee's purpose. See pix at http://www.massey.ac.nz/~alock/175316new/lecture_notes/lecture_16/lecture_16.html

So we see "red" or smell "sweet". But to think of those as "mental qualities in themselves" is a very particular way of parsing experience. It is a habit of thought that every philosophy of mind student sure learns to pick up as a social necessity. However psychological science would like to talk about how its not really an ecologically-valid construct.

Our awareness of red is always the awareness of something red. There is an embeddedness that gives the experience a meaning and purpose. It is then a philosophical version of scientism - let's call it idealism :0 - to suppress the always interpreted nature of experience and just try to talk about the uninterpreted "bare particulars".

Qualia talk gives unjustified realism to "sensory impressions" just as much as scientific materialism wants to talk too substantially about "the material world". It is all part of the strong causal dualism at the heart of Western thinking. And that is what Peircian semiotics in particular tries to get away from.

Why do you think that the elimination of mystery is a requirement? Humans are after all subject of experience, and you may never know what it is that makes another subject 'tick'. You can't write a specification for a person. I think the impulse or desire to scientifically explain the nature of the mind really is a form of scientism, whether you want to call it biosemiotic or whatever. — Wayfarer

Maybe I am just more curious than the average dude. I like to know how everything works.

But scientism is different in that it is a self-satisfied reductionism. You know that my semiotic approach talks only of minimising vagueness or uncertainty. So it builds in a notion of its own proper epistemic limitations. It accepts that it might in the end only be a sophisticated form of instrumentalism. And that more closely fits any philosophy of science definition of scientific inquiry.

Plus why should we think the mind is so beyond explanation given the vast number of things we now understand very well and are no longer a mystery?

Well, you may not take Dennett seriously, but his latest book has been reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and The New Statesman and will probably be on the best-seller lists for some time to come. I say that, lest anyone accuse me of 'attacking a straw man'. And also, Dennett comes across as a highly accomplished, and even very likeable, person, and obviously highly intelligent. So how come a guy that smart, can spend his whole live defending a thesis that me and a lot of other philosophers think is obviously wrong, is an important point in its own right.

I know your approach is considerably different to Dennett's but the fact that Dennett is so widely read, and so uncompromising in his materialism of mind, makes his work a useful reference point, at the very least.

Plus why should we think the mind is so beyond explanation given the vast number of things we now understand very well and are no longer a mystery? — apokrisis

Because it mistakes where science is in the hierarchy of understanding. Science deals with what can be explained, objectified, measured, analysed, from minute to galactic scales. But naturalism is based on a stance, namely, that of observer and object of observation. First Kant, and then phenomenology, actually tries to 'turn the light around', to look at the very act of observation itself. And that is a different kind of stance to naturalism. An implication of that, is that it requires that we give up some precision and definiteness, in return for an intuitive grasp of the nature of the workings of mind. The instrumentalist approach must always be to objectify the mind, to turn it into the purported object of investigation. That then situates mind within the domain of phenomena. And as I argued at length in the thread on panpsychism a couple of weeks back, I think that is a profound mistake. Dennett, in particular, is desperate to 'de-mystify' the nature of mind and life - to say 'at last, science has unravelled the mystery'. You see, I think that is in some sense pathological - I think it's driven by the actual fear of the mysterious nature of life and mind. It is instructive that Dennett, Dawkins, and the like, are always obliged to deny or obfuscate the mysterious nature of life and mind. Robert Rosen, I suspect, would never do that.

A quote from the New Yorker article on Dennett:

“The person who tells people how an effect is achieved is often resented, considered a spoilsport, a party-pooper,” he wrote, around a decade ago, in a paper called “Explaining the ‘Magic’ of Consciousness.” “If you actually manage to explain consciousness, they say, you will diminish us all, turn us into mere protein robots, mere things.” Dennett does not believe that we are “mere things.” He thinks that we have souls, but he is certain that those souls can be explained by science. If evolution built them, they can be reverse-engineered. “There ain’t no magic there,” he told me. “Just stage magic.”

Science is not omniscience- it is not all-knowing. In fact, I'm starting to realise that it isn't even all-knowing with respect to those things which it thinks are utterly amenable to scientific explication. (I mean, look at the 'standard model!') It is pragmatically indispensable but it is limited in scope by the very assumptions it starts with. Really what that amounts to is an admission of humility - which is the very thing lacking from 'scientism'.

I prefer Max Planck's take:

Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are part of nature and therefore part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.

Peirce seems to have shared these sentiments:

Tell me, upon sufficient authority, that all cerebration depends upon movements of neurites that strictly obey certain physical laws, and that thus all expressions of thought, both external and internal, receive a physical explanation, and I shall be ready to believe you. But if you go on to say that this explodes the theory that my neighbour and myself are governed by reason, and are thinking beings, I must frankly say that it will not give me a high opinion of your intelligence. — CP 6.465, 1908 — aletheist

Interesting quote. You may be aware that a family of theistic arguments (generally, the argument from reason) make the claim which Peirce here rejects, i.e. that beings whose mental processes are wholly governed by naturalistic or material forces thereby have cause to doubt the reliability of their ratiocinations.

But you want to preserve the mystery because you believe in the mystical already. Your epistemic arguments are soaked in self-interest. You must reject naturalism in any form if it threatens to weaken your case for the supernatural.

That is why you constantly seek out the worst examples of scientism you can find. You need its blatant folly to spare your blushes.

But quite plainly the semiotic approach to epistemology takes the observer seriously. The whole point is that the "observables" of any theory are not objective facts but only "reasonable signs" that mediate a relation with "the world".

You have to keep forgetting that semiosis builds in the observer so you can keep strawmanning me as just another bloody materialist. It gets tiresome.

But you want to preserve the mystery because you believe in the mystical already. Your epistemic arguments are soaked in self-interest. You must reject naturalism in any form if it threatens to weaken your case for the supernatural. — apokrisis

I don't believe it. I try to avoid beliefs, as far as possible. But it pushes your buttons because you can't fit what I say into your biosemiotic schema, at which point you invariably resort to ad homs.

//ps//

You must reject naturalism in any form if it threatens to weaken your case for the supernatural. — apokrisis

Besides, I don't 'reject naturalism in any form'. The question was asked, 'why should we think the mind is beyond scientific explanation?' and I responded to that question, with reference to Kant and phenomenology.

Also, I'm not 'comparing you to Dennett', in fact, I acknowledged that 'your approach is considerably different to Dennett's'.

The thing about the cogito is that it is really a doubting and rejecting of experiences themselves. We have more experiences than just the cogito.

Red, the movement of an arm, the approaching truck, the dragon bearing down, are all undoubtable experiences too. Their presence is what allows Descartes to about their accuracy. We can't speculate about whether we really see a dragon if there is no sight of a dragon. "I think therefore, I am " is mistaken. It should read: "I experience (whether that be self, red, a moving body or dragon," therefore I am having that experience." Descartes makes the mistake of abstraction our present self away from our experiences, such that the presnece of all an individuals experiences are beyond doubt. Our thoughts and self are actually present in the same realm as anything we are are aware (e.g. the present experience of a dragon shows a real dragon bearing down) or not aware of (e.g. when the experience of a dragon is an "illusion" and the person cannot see what's really there)

This error of abstraction has dire consequences when talking about things like self, free will or the mind. They all become abstracted out of the world we experience, as if the world we see around us had nothing to do with our self, free will or mind. We form this notion observation, awareness or measurement of the world are incomparable with self, mind and free will. It creates the "hard problem."

If we avoid the mistake of abstracting the mind out of the world, the sorts of problems you are talking about never arise. To measure and report data about, for example, the reactions of the body doesn't violate free will, self or the mind. Since free will, self and the mind are all, themselves, material they are not mutually exclusive with measurements or observations of them world.

Free will is an excellent example. How exactly are you going to decide what to have for breakfast without your body? It's literally impossible. If you are going to move to the pantry, get out the cereal rather than the bread, pour it in a bowl, immerse it in milk, you need your body-- there must be observations, measurements, chemical actions, electrical signals in the body, etc. if you are to make that choice. All those are undoubtable experiences that constitute the making of the choice to eat the cereal.

There needs to be a justification for why we ought to doubt something that is so close and personal and accept something that is further away from our immediate experiences. If we're not willing to believe in our most close experiences, what reason do we have to believe in things that are further away? — darthbarracuda

This is exactly what substance dualism does and how the myth of the "hard problem" is created. It denies our personal experiences, of body, of measurement of the world, which undoubtably occur with out awareness of self, mind and free will. Unwilling to believe these close experiences, the substance dualist is then caught denying anything further away (i.e. other states which casually relate to the existence of our minds) and, finally, our minds themselves (i.e. that minds just don't "make sense," that they are a "mystery," that they have nothing to do with world).

You may be aware that a family of theistic arguments (generally, the argument from reason) make the claim which Peirce here rejects, i.e. that beings whose mental processes are wholly governed by naturalistic or material forces thereby have cause to doubt the reliability of their ratiocinations. — Arkady

Keep in mind that Peirce was a self-described objective idealist who held "that matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws" (CP 6.25, 1891). In other words, he believed that mental processes and material forces are only different in degree, rather than in kind, and that the former are primordial relative to the latter. "Accordingly, just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body, we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thought is in us" (CP 5.289n1, 1868). Therefore, I suspect that he would have agreed with the argument from reason that our beliefs cannot be fully explained in terms of non-rational causes. Furthermore, he was himself a theist who argued that the reality of God is a highly plausible hypothesis - a spontaneous conjecture of instinctive reason, just like any successful scientific theory in its initial formulation.

Red, the movement of an arm, the approaching truck, the dragon bearing down, are all undoubtable experiences too. — TheWillowOfDarkness

It's nonsense to claim that these experiences are undoubtable. Why not doubt that what you see is really "red", that what you are doing is really "moving your arm", or that what you perceive is really an "approaching truck"? You may argue as Wittgenstein does in "On Certainty", that it is unreasonable to doubt such things, but if, out of the thousands of times a day that an individual makes such assumptions, there is but one instance of error, then it is reasonable to doubt all such assumptions, because without doubting them one will never know which ones are mistaken.

This is exactly what substance dualism does and how the myth of the "hard problem" is created. It denies our personal experiences, of body, of measurement of the world, which undoubtably occur with out awareness of self, mind and free will. — TheWillowOfDarkness

That personal experiences occur without an awareness of self is itself a highly dubious proposition, most likely false. That an experience is "personal" implies that it is proper to the person. How could a person have an experience, that experience being property of that person alone, without having an awareness of one's self? Isn't having an experience which is proper to yourself alone, itself an awareness of yourself?

To "experience" requires an awareness, and to experience something personal requires an awareness of the person. By saying that the experience is proper to yourself alone, you indicate an awareness of yourself. If you assign such an experience to something else, you indicate that this something else also has an awareness of itself, or else it is not undergoing the same type of experience. If it is not the same type of experience, then by what principle would you call it an experience which is proper only to itself?

That's a strawman. My point was the presences of the experiences are undoubtable. One may still doubt the content of experience is true. Here the point is not that our knowledge or experiences are always accurate, but that they are present. Such experiences are a required object before we even approach the question of whether they show as what is true or not. Just like the presence of oneself and experience of oneself, the presence of any other experience cannot be doubted. They are present before we get to the question of whether an experience shows what is true.


Experiences without awareness of the self are not dubious. They are common. Indeed, most of our experiences are exactly that. We don't go around saying: "I am" all day. That's only a specific experience we sometimes have, particularly when we are reflecting (which is why philosophers often mistake it for the extent of our awareness. They get caught thinking we must always be reflecting philosophically). Most of the time, what we are aware of does not include ourself at all: red, car, tree, ball, toast for breakfast, "GOALLLLLLL!!!!!," "Mum!," "Dad!," "Hungry," pain, etc. Having the experience of being one person alone, of the self, is actually fairly rare. Not because it is wrong or somehow mistaken, but rather because we are most often interested in other things.

No doubt there is a person having all these experiences, but it is not realised in the given experience. To be aware of the self, to think "I am," is a different instance of experience. To have an experience which is your own is not necessarily awareness of yourself.

Only people like substance dualist using Descartes' cogito make the error of thinking being a person must amount to awareness of oneself. Why? Well... the presence of anything except the self experience ( "I think, therefore I am" ) is rejected. To them, it incoherent to consider the presence of a person without such an experience, for personhood and mind are equivocated with an experience of self-awarness. There literally can't be any people or minds unless someone is thinking about the presence of their self.

It is instructive that Dennett, Dawkins, and the like, are always obliged to deny or obfuscate the mysterious nature of life and mind. — Wayfarer

Are life and mind any more "mysterious" than matter? The problem with the idea of 'mystery', is that it suggests something hidden, something occult, that might be somehow uncovered, rather than just the simple fact that matter, life and mind are thinkable in their temporal, finite senses, but as ultimate, absolute, infinite and/or eternal, cannot be fully grasped by a finite mind.

because without doubting them one will never know which ones are mistaken. — Metaphysician Undercover

With the experience of doubting them one will never know which ones are mistaken. Knowing is not something that can be warranted by some other criteria. As Spinoza suggests, before you can know that you know, know that you know that you know, know that you know that you know that you know, and so on to infinity (this being the supposed skeptical challenge to the possibility of knowing anything) you must first know.

Are life and mind any more "mysterious" than matter? — John

Can you arive at an understanding of them on the basis of the physical sciences? Are they physical?

just the simple fact that matter, life and mind are thinkable in their temporal, finite senses, — John

What you do mean by 'thinkable'?

Can you arive at an understanding of them on the basis of the physical sciences? Are they physical? — Wayfarer

The physical sciences deal with the physical; i.e. matter. The life sciences (biology for example) deal with life, and the sciences of the mind (neuroscience, psychology for examples) deal with the mind. Physics alone cannot lead to an understanding of climate. Is climate a physical phenomenon?

What you do mean by 'thinkable'? — Wayfarer

Well, we know what the terms mean, don't we? You know what it means when I say that something is material, or that something is alive, or that a person changed their mind, don't you?

The life sciences (biology for example) deal with life, and the sciences of the mind (neuroscience, psychology for examples) deal with the mind. — John

And where does philosophy fit into all that? Do you think philosophy of mind will ultimately be a matter for neuroscience and neurobiology? Is it just a matter of time until they 'crack the nut'?

As for 'thinkable', it is too vague a term to serve any purpose.

What do you think could possibly be understood philosophically speaking about mind, matter or life that is not informed by the various sciences? This is not to say that there are not (in-finite) aspects of mind, matter and life that will never be understood; either scientifically or philosophically, simply in virtue of the limitations of finite intellects.

Such "aspects" are, I believe, like the ideas of infinity and eternity themselves, best "understood" apophatically, metaphorically, allegorically, by allusion, by "intimation", imaginative intuition, and so on; but this is not the same as rational, scientific, or philosophical understanding, because it cannot be explicated or positively determined.

And "thinkable' is no more vague that many other terms such as 'explicable', 'determinable', 'comprehensible' and so on. I have no doubt that you know what it means very well.